Welcome to JUN’s world - Weverse Magazine

FEATURE

Welcome to JUN’s world

A peak into the creative process behind the artist’s solo work

2023.08.28

Credit

Article. Lee Yejin

Photo Credit. PLEDIS Entertainment

“I learned and improved through my previous solo tracks,” says JUN. “It was thanks to that that I was able to put out ‘LIMBO’ and ‘PSYCHO.’” It’s a simple statement, but it encapsulates the whole journey of his solo work, from his special single “Can You Sit By My Side?” in 2018, to “PSYCHO,” which came out last month. His early solo efforts, like “Can You Sit By My Side?,” “Crow,” and “Silent Boarding Gate,” were mostly centered around him expressing his emotions vocally. “Silent Boarding Gate,” for example, takes everything the artist was feeling during the pandemic and packages it all up in a metaphor. “It’s about how lonely and restricted I felt during that time when I couldn’t visit my home country, China, and how disconnected I was from people,” JUN says. At the time, he was taking a walk by the Hangang River when he saw the red Sun setting into the darkness, and he compares the experience to “cold passion.” He conveys his feelings of loneliness in other descriptions of the world around him, too (“At the silent boarding gate / I see the clouds scatter / The sky a mix of red and gray / I want to fly to a new version of me (在寂寞号登机口 / 我瞧云飞走 / 半橘半灰的天空 / 想飞往下一个我)”). In these older songs, JUN was often placed in the shoes of their subjects, where he then expressed himself emotionally: He speaks through the words of “Can You Sit By My Side?” to show how much he loves his fans, and projects himself against the titular bird in “Crow” to get his point across. Then, he released “LIMBO” last September, and everything changed.

“LIMBO” acts like a guidebook on JUN’s invented universe, one inspired by some of his favorite works like Inception, and based on “the notes I jot down whenever I have time about the world I’m dreaming of,” the singer explains. He interprets the world not only as he experiences it firsthand but also through the many works of fiction he consumes that continually inspire him. “I’ve always loved novels and movies,” JUN says, “if I close my eyes while I sing, it’s easy to see the scene the lyrics are describing in my head, and then I get really into the song.” Like the concept of Limbo in Inception, JUN’s “LIMBO” is a mind space governed by the subconscious, and this is where he constructs his own personal world. Here, JUN is free to be anything: “Don’t be afraid! / Don’t say no more! / I just want to set you free,” as the lyrics go. “That world lets me capture all the different sides and emotions that belong to me,” JUN explains. “In simple terms, it’s a world I make for the people I like and it’s everything I want to say to them: ‘Welcome, welcome.’” Where JUN’s earliest solo songs focused on getting his feelings across, since “LIMBO,” he’s been the architect of a world that allows him to live in his own fantasy-filled subconscious, and it’s to that place that he’s now inviting his listeners. Later, the character JUN creates for himself in “PSYCHO” roams about the world he’s created in “LIMBO.”

For “PSYCHO,” JUN leaves spaces intentionally blank in the song so he can fill them in through his performance in the video. After the line, “Don’t fool yourself anymore, psycho,” in the chorus, JUN lurches forward, unstoppable, creating a tense air and suggesting someone’s true identity has just been revealed in some way. When the same line comes up the next time the chorus comes around, he goes from letting out a maniacal laughter to being completely expressionless in an instant, drawing the viewers’ attention to the character he’s playing. “LIMBO” builds to its chorus and the line, “Welcome to my lost world,” which is placed in relief against the repetition of the whispered, “A dream in a dream, sweet dream.” While this gives listeners the impression of being trapped in the impossible, “PSYCHO” goes to extreme lengths to make you pay attention to the way JUN moves around within it—the way his character navigates the fantasy world he designed. “I wanted to make it so the people watching it would find it immersive and moving, even if that meant going a little overboard,” says JUN. Just as the characters in Inception build dreams for them to navigate, JUN leverages his music and the accompanying videos to construct a world between the real and the unreal, with its own lore and characters.

“Where ‘LIMBO’ was supposed to be a fantasy world,” JUN says, “‘PSYCHO’ is closer to me as a person.” “PSYCHO,” he says, started from the idea that “every person is special,” and was crafted to convey a specific message: “If you want to love this world, you have to love yourself first.” JUN’s visuals and actions in the video are as new to him as they are unorthodox on the whole, like the red vinyl jacket he’s wearing when stretching his mouth open with his fingers, or clutching his head with his two hands and violently shaking it. But it’s showing how even this strange, misunderstood character can love himself that drives home the message, and it’s that same message that JUN has sought to convey since he was first working on “Crow.” “With ‘Crow,’ I wanted to try and challenge the bad reputation that crows have—the stereotype about the bird,” JUN explains. “I think if I want to bring people over to my side, I have to convince myself of it first—just like I have to love crows with all my heart before I can show others what makes them amazing. In the same way, I wanted ‘PSYCHO’ to help challenge the preconceived notions people have of me by first acknowledging my unique quirks and qualities myself.” For JUN, “PSYCHO” is essentially the “Crow” as it exists in “LIMBO.” In both “Crow” and “PSYCHO” he’s expressing himself; he uses straightforward, exaggerated visuals to challenge any negative perceptions resulting from him living life the way he sees fit. “I don’t know how I would be able to show people how I feel if I wasn’t honest with myself,” JUN says. “So I’m telling them, Look, the JUN you think you know isn’t just this one thing—I am constantly changing, and I might develop qualities unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. I just want to let you know in advance.” That makes his solo songs not just a record of an evolving artist but of a young man who’s figuring out who he is and what he wants. So we can see how JUN introduced himself as a crow, slowly absorbed ideas from books and movies, created his own ideal world, and came out to the world as a “PSYCHO.”

JUN calls “LIMBO” and “PSYCHO” his “solo pieces that can comprehensively showcase all the elements of a stage—song, dance, and even acting—in full.” In the time from “Can You Sit By My Side?” to “PSYCHO,” he’s widened the scope of what he’s artistically capable of in terms of music, choreography, and videography. At the same time, he’s found more ways of taking what he finds in his imagination and making it a reality. And working out a choreography as a solo artist as opposed to with his group requires a completely different approach, including knowing how to make decisions when faced with so many possibilities. “When I’m performing with the group, I’m like a part of a car, metaphorically speaking,” he says. “I might be one of the left tires, or the brakes. Even if just one part has an issue, it has an effect on the whole. So I have to make sure I’m playing my part and that people can tell the brakes on that car are good. That’s why I have to think a lot about what I can personally contribute. By contrast, when I’m doing solo work, I’m the whole car, so I have to think about the brand. In that case, the whole story that unfolds on stage is up to me.” JUN says it might even have been easier for “PSYCHO” if he had been able to do the perfectly-in-sync group dances he’s so used to, since the song is driven by a hard beat. But he went beyond simply making the moves look good and also focused on using the choreography to fully express the world and its narrative as he intended. That’s why, instead of the intricate movements we’re used to seeing him pull off when performing with SEVENTEEN, he opts instead for subtle smiles and acting out the lyrics. That’s why the backup dancers aren’t simply dancing with JUN but also become the backdrop around him: to show the relationship between him and the wider world. This is particularly evident in “PSYCHO,” where JUN and his surrounding world are thrown into stark relief as he’s dressed in white and the other dancers, symbolizing the world around him, are all dressed in black.

“It’s clear to me where I had trouble when working on ‘LIMBO,’” JUN says—specifically, “expressing myself clearly, and the self-doubt I experienced here and there.” What he came to realize while making the song was just what a solo song means to him as an artist and as a person. The song earned JUN an award for the best new singer-songwriter of the year at the 2023 Tencent Music Entertainment Awards (TMEA) on July 8. For JUN, solo work is a process of learning what he wants to express, and of course, putting that into action.” “It was hard at first to properly express, this is exactly what I like, this is what I want to do, this is what I don’t like,” JUN reveals, adding that “so it was a long process to be able to speak openly and work with so many people on ‘LIMBO.’” In the time between releasing “Crow” and “PSYCHO,” he went from singing about crows as an observer (“They’re not evil but that’s how they’re seen / Out wandering alone in the streets / Ignoring the cold looks from everybody (非败类却被归类 / 在街上独自徘徊 / 漠视那众目睽睽)”) to becoming his own subject and asking himself the hard questions (“Hey, who’s the weirdo in someone else’s eyes? (hey 谁又是谁眼中的异类) … Don’t fool yourself anymore, psycho (别再骗自己了 psycho)”)—a process that enabled the young artist to find his voice, and one that increasingly instilled him with self-confidence. “I wouldn’t always give myself a perfect score,” he says, “but I can say for sure that each new song will always be better than the last, so there’s no need to worry.”